ABSTRACT
In thinking of imagination in relation to music, it seems clear that the creative imagination is involved in such musical activities as musical composition and improvisation. Perhaps composers, in writing musical works, imagine musical forms, timbres, textures, and the like by creating images of these in their auditory imaginations, and then later often but not always test their hypotheses about these images through actual music-making (Levinson 1992: 84–5). The same might hold true of improvisers in jazz and other oral traditions, such as Indian classical music, which call essentially for improvisation, though the auditory imagination must work much quicker here, since improvisers play or perform what they imagine, or some variant thereof, soon after imagining it, leaving aside what has been imagined prior to the commencement of the improvisatory performance.
